Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica
What a day we had for our last during our trip between Costa Rica and Panama. Today we visited Manuel Antonio National Park on the central pacific coast of Costa Rica. This is one of the few places where you have a nice combination of tropical rain forest and long sandy beaches with great warm water as well one of the best parks to observe wild life animals, especially medium size mammals. For these and other reasons, this area is considered by many people one of the crown jewels of the park system of the country.
The reason why a wide variety of the wild life is easily seen is a simple one: this is the smallest national park in the country. Even though it is attached to main land it has become an island for the animals living in there, isolated from civilization. The island is not even sizable enough for large animals, especially the big alpha predators like jaguars and mountain lions that usually keep the small and medium size animal populations under control. This has led to a demographic explosion of medium size animals, including sloths, some monkeys, raccoons, agoutis, and coatis amoung others.
So today right after breakfast we headed over to explore this beautiful tropical forest. We saw many three toed sloths (some of then even with babies), a few two toed sloths, white throated capuchin monkeys, some howler monkeys, black iguanas, Jesus lizards and of course we had our last swim in the warm waters of the Pacific.
If that wasn’t enough some took to town to do some last minute shopping and some (the most daring) went on a zip line through the tropical rain forest canopy.
Not a bad way to end a wonderful trip!
What a day we had for our last during our trip between Costa Rica and Panama. Today we visited Manuel Antonio National Park on the central pacific coast of Costa Rica. This is one of the few places where you have a nice combination of tropical rain forest and long sandy beaches with great warm water as well one of the best parks to observe wild life animals, especially medium size mammals. For these and other reasons, this area is considered by many people one of the crown jewels of the park system of the country.
The reason why a wide variety of the wild life is easily seen is a simple one: this is the smallest national park in the country. Even though it is attached to main land it has become an island for the animals living in there, isolated from civilization. The island is not even sizable enough for large animals, especially the big alpha predators like jaguars and mountain lions that usually keep the small and medium size animal populations under control. This has led to a demographic explosion of medium size animals, including sloths, some monkeys, raccoons, agoutis, and coatis amoung others.
So today right after breakfast we headed over to explore this beautiful tropical forest. We saw many three toed sloths (some of then even with babies), a few two toed sloths, white throated capuchin monkeys, some howler monkeys, black iguanas, Jesus lizards and of course we had our last swim in the warm waters of the Pacific.
If that wasn’t enough some took to town to do some last minute shopping and some (the most daring) went on a zip line through the tropical rain forest canopy.
Not a bad way to end a wonderful trip!
